hidden costs behind the ‘green revolution’
Here are two examples from many that illustrate the way in which the “green revolution” merely acts as a smoke and mirror trick, whereby one environmental problem is “fixed” but creates other—often larger—problems for the environment in other ways.
Food. (NYT) (thanks to beneath the pavement [formerly Auckland’s Burning] for posting this article.)
The world’s food situation is bleak, and shortsighted policies in the United States and other wealthy countries — which are diverting crops to environmentally dubious biofuels — bear much of the blame.
The global cost of wheat has increased by 80% in the last year alone.
Prices have gone so high that the World Food Program, which aims to feed 73 million people this year, said it might have to reduce rations or the number of people it will help.
The reason? We’re not growing food to eat, we’re increasingly growing food to put in our gas tanks.
Yet the most important reason for the price shock is the rich world’s subsidized appetite for biofuels. In the United States, 14 percent of the corn crop was used to produce ethanol in 2006 — a share expected to reach 30 percent by 2010.
Now, you might be thinking, “well, my new plug-in Prius runs solely on electricity.”
They may not be gas-guzzlers, but electric cars have a raging thirst for water. (ENN)
A comparison of the volume of coolant water used in the thermoelectric power plants that provide most of our electricity and that used in extracting and refining petroleum suggests that electric vehicles require significantly more water per mile than those powered by gasoline.
Explore posts in the same categories: "green"… cars, light trucks, and SUVs running off the electric grid consume three times more water and withdraw 17 times more water per mile than their equivalent gasoline-powered vehicles.
March 7th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Exactly. As far as the “green” revolution goes, the pop-media, and just about everyone else, is focused on how we can keep the cars moving, not on how we need to live differently. Infinite motoring, even with alternative fuels, is not something that can be sustained without severely damaging or hampering some aspect of our biosystem or our economy. But try telling that to anyone. The car is America; America is the car. Gasoline prices will have to soar to unthinkable heights before most Americans will even consider that the almighty auto just might be a false god.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:21 am
I didn’t know about the water consumption in the electric cars! Thank you for your well-written and very informative entries!